Friedrich Engels: Zur Wohnungsfrage

Available at bookstores, the shop at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and online at Spector Books.

In a series of three essays published by Friedrich Engels in 1872 in the Leipzig newspaper Der Volksstaat, the author analyses the structural conditions surrounding housing shortages in capitalism and delivers a polemic against the reformist ideas of middle-class socialists and the bourgeoisie. He rejected a pre-revolutionary approach to improving living conditions. The housing question could not, in his view, be resolved with architectural ideas or urban-planning concepts but required the overthrow of social relations.